Monday, March 25, 2013

Talking Points 7: Brave, Orenstein--Connections

After reading Orenstein's chapters, particularly the section on "Pinkification" and then reading Tyne's blog regarding the Steubenville rape case, it only made sense that this performance came to mind. I'm glad I was able to find it as for a moment the poet's name escaped me but luckily I had posted it to tumblr a year or so ago and it was easy to find (that's why tagging is important, y'all!)I'll post the text of it at the end of this post. Do watch the video, it's powerful

Reading the Peggy Orenstein excerpts from Cinderella Ate My Daughter served not
only to be a good supplement to the Pixar film Brave but also to our course
assumptions, particularly the second (Youth is a Culturally Constructed
Category). In the chapter “Pinked!” Orenstein gives many examples of how youth,
and various stages of youth, are truly just cultural constructs and nothing
more. Not only are these categories cultural constructs but they have been
constructed to uphold our society’s dominant ideology of Capitalism. As Raby
noted in “A Tangle of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence”, pleasurable
consumption is a dominant discourse of teenagehood:

Youth today are
courted as a high-consumer group, and are modelled in the

media as the ideal
age, with teenagehood constituting the onset of ‘the best years

of your life’.
Social historians often connect the emergence of adolescence to

processes of production and patterns of consumption (Raby, 437).

What Orenstein’s text makes
clear is that teenagers aren’t the only valuable group that marketers target.
The whole Princess line was created because of its marketability. Dora the Explorer, supposedly an example of
Nickolodean’s subversive gender portrayals, might as well be a part of the
Disney Princess line when it comes to her toys and other merchandise
(Orenstein, 42). What’s actually good for the children, in this case the young
girls’, psyche isn’t even a factor passed the first stage of product
development. More important than teaching girls that they can be a wide variety
of things, that they can embody a multitude of characteristics and interests,
is cash-money. How does that not disgust everyone?

Another truly sad thing about
many popular girls’ toys, particularly the Disney Princess line, is that these
toys put docility and fragility on pedestal. It’s not as if these Disney
Princesses are giving us subversive takes on what a princess is. They are very
much in line with what we would expect. The Princesses that are showcased are
always waiting for “True Love’s Kiss”, they love their man with every fiber of
their being and would sacrifice themselves for said man, they often enjoy
cleaning or are at least very good at it. They rarely have much motivation
beyond love, and even if they started out with others motivations half way
through their story LOVE becomes the biggest thing on their mind. There’s
nothing wrong with love and wanting to be in a happy and fulfilling
relationship, but to teach our young girls that that’s what their main focus to
be is a great detriment. Even the princesses who we think combat the dominant
depiction of the servile and fragile princess actually aren’t subversive at
all.. In Croteau’s “Media and
Ideology” he notes:

Research
on the ideology of media has included a debate between those who argue that
media promote the worldview of the powerful—the “dominant ideology”—and those
who argue that mass media texts include more contradictory messages, both
expressing the “dominant ideology” and at least partially challenging
worldviews (Croteau, 161)

Where Croteau doesn’t go far enough,
in this particular piece, is that he does not address how the seemingly
contradictory messages are often just disguises, Trojan horses if you will.
Take Mulan for example. I wrote about this before in a comment section to Julie’s
second blog post on Christensen’s “Unlearning the Myths that Bind Us”.
Mulan is NOT the gender-bending badass “Princess” that people like to believe she
is. Nala, from Lion Kind, is more badass than Mulan to be honest. Mulan is a
strong woman, yes, but the strength that she exhibits is simply a different
expression of the same beliefs as the other princesses. Mulan’s great
sacrifice, risking her life to fight, was in order to protect her father. It was an act of selflessness,
which is a characteristic that we often teach to our young girls. Selflessness,
self-sacrifice, these are traits that we instill, usually covertly, to the young
women in society. In moderation these traits aren’t terrible, and in fact can
serve to make someone a compassionate human being. However, girls aren’t often
taught to be self-sacrificial in moderation. We are taught that we need to
serve others, that we must be kind and caring and help others in any way that
we can (even if that serves to hurt us). That’s a damaging thing to constantly be
teaching kids, especially if no counter-message is produced.

Orenstein touched upon a
wonderful point when she mentioned the ways in which intragender competition is
taught to girls. There can only be one highlander princess. That princess must
be the fairest in the land or else she risks her status as a princess. This
competition is not only with the girls’ peers, it’s
intragender-intergenerational competition that is bred. We see this through the
common tropes of women presented in these stories: The Crone, The Matron, and
the young beautiful girl/princess. The Crone is what we never want to be, the
Crone is the old Queen who gave Snow White the apple. The Matron…well she has
one foot in the doorway to Croneville. The Princess…she’s the one we want to
be, she’s good/nice/sweet/beautiful/etc. This is another message that’s often
given covertly (through a “secret Education” if you will). As I said, take Snow
White for example. We all know what trope Snow is. The Queen, however, inhabits
both. She is at once the Matron and the Crone. As she ages, she becomes more
evil and more overtaken by jealousy. At the peak of her despicability she is
THE CRONE. Older women are rarely depicted as anything other than evil in
Princess tales (unless their ~*~*magical fairies/godmothers*~*~). We even get
this in Brave, the so-called feminist
Princess movie. There’s really no evil antagonist in Brave. The closest that we come to evil would be the Witch
*cough*Crone*cough*. She set everything awry in Merida’s life, and if she could
do that who knows what evil she’s capable of.

I did enjoy Brave, it was an entertaining film to
watch. However, it was not a feminist Princess flick in the least. The majority
of the competition in the film was intragender, as usual. The most subversive
part of the film wasn’t that Merida was athletic and could shoot arrows like
nobodies’ business but rather that she was a selfish brat. I’m not saying this
because she wanted to put herself first over tradition, but the lengths that
she went were incredibly selfish. Enlisting in some random witch’s help to change
one’s mother is generally not a good idea. As they say in Once Upon a Time “magic always comes with a price”. And it did.
Even after her mother was turned into a bear it took forever for Merida to stop
thinking solely of herself and to see her mother’s plight (that she caused,
mind you). And so we're still left with basically what we had before Brave. We lack a good example of a balanced character for young girls. Merida's selfishness makes me question her strength. Is she truly strong or is she just self-centered? We don't want to teach children to only be selfless, but we also don't want to teach them that they should ONLY think about themselves (unless they turn someone into a bear, then they should probably get some compassion and get their shit together).Anywho, I don’t want to linger too long on Brave or else I won’t have anything to say in class tomorrow.

Speaking of class, I suppose my
questions would be: How did y’all see Merida? Did you see her as a feminist
Princess? Do you think she’s a good role model for girls? What would you
envision a “feminist princess story” looking like? What would the
characteristics of the Princess be? Is it possible to have a feminist princess
story?

And now the text of the poem, as promised

PAPER DOLLSSierra DeMulderWe are taughtfrom the moment we leave our pink nurserythat we are collapsable paper dollslight to holdeasier to crumple. that as women our worth lives secretly wrapped in lace and cotton pantiesour fragility armored with pepper spray and mace, they say:ONE IN TEN. ONE IN SIX. ONE IN THREEwomen will be raped or sexually abused in their lifetimeand I am one of three daughters.Now imagine: each victim is an acrobatHer sanity, a balancing actOur response is the unfailing safety netWe never expect to see her across the wireYou weren’t just violated, we tell herYou are an empty museumA gutted monument to what used to hold so much worthAnd with the best intentions we tell her to reclaim it,Put a price tag on her rape and own it,But don’t stand too tall, don’t act too strongor we will name you denial, come back when you’re ready to crumbleLike your bones are made of chalkYou may only laugh cutely or cry beautifullySo cry beautifullyWe will catch youWe are calling it theft As if he could pluck open your ribs like cello stringsPocket your breasts, steal what makes your heart flutter and tack its wings to his wall,Some days you will feel dirty!Some weeks you’ll remember how hard it is to breathe in public, like your heart beat is climbing to the attic of your throat only to suicide itself out on the pavementBut know this: the person who did this to you is broken, not you.The person who did this to you is out there, somewhere choking on the glass of his chest, it is a windshield, and his heartbeat is a baseball bat saying regret this, regret thisNOTHING WAS STOLEN FROM YOU.Your body is not a hand-me-downThere is nothing that sits inside you holding your worth,no locket that can be seen or touched, sucked from your stomach and left on the concreteAnd I know it’s hard to feel perfectwhen you can’t tell an Adam’s apple from a fistbecause some ashtray of a man picked you to play his Eden.but I will notwatch youcollapse.